That suspiciously Wagnerian name was actually the pseudonym of Ravel’s friend Léon Leclère, one of the most versatile members of the circle of young poets, painters and musicians who called themselves "Apaches." Leclère/Klingsor was known primarily as a painter and poet, but had also composed songs; as Alexis Roland-Manuel noted in his biographical memoir of Ravel, Klingsor "teased all the Muses, and came to no harm." As soon as Klingsor’s Shéhérazade was published, in 1903, Ravel indicated his eagerness to set some of the poems; he began at once, completed the orchestral settings before the end of the year, and attended the very successful premiere on May
17, 1904, when the work was sung by the soprano Jane Hatto in a concert of the Société National de Musique conducted by Alfred Cortot. A few years later, Klingsor himself wrote that Ravel’s

love of difficulty made him choose, together with "L’Indifférent" and "La Flûte enchantée," [a poem] whose
long narrative made it appear quite unsuitable for his purpose: "Asie." For at that time he was engaged
in a study of spoken verse, and was aiming at emphasizing accents and
inflections and magnifying them by melodic transposition; to fix his design
firmly, he insisted on my reading the lines aloud. . . . For Ravel, setting a
poem meant transforming it into expressive recitative, to exalt the inflections
of speech to the state of song, to exalt all the possibilities of the word, but
not to subjugate it. Ravel made himself the servant of the poet.

In his Shéhérazade Overture (which finally got
a second hearing at the time of the Ravel centenary, and has been recorded several
times since then) Ravel had made use of Debussy’s whole-tone scale, and he
acknowledged in so many words that "Debussy’s spiritual influence at least is
fairly obvious" in these orchestral songs. "In them again," he added, "I have
succumbed to the profound fascination which the East has held for me since
childhood."